SAINT-JOHN PERSE AND SURREALISM IN THE LIGHT OF A WORK BY MICHEL CARROUGES

par Corinne Prinderre

Is it not astonishing that Saint-John Perse, a poet of the real who never interrupted his quest for the exact word — his library attests to this — chose to use the term "surreality"[1] during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech? Yet great specialists have dismissed the possibility of any surrealist influence on Perse. In Saint-John Perse et quelques devanciers, Monique Parent evokes the poet's interest in surrealism in these terms:

From his contacts with Surrealism, Saint-John Perse retained the art of bringing words together in a surprising and natural way at the same time [...] ; also that of using unexpected images. [...] he did not linger over automatic writing and did not indulge in inspiration coming from the subconscious. The work of art is for him as for Paul Valéry, a work of intelligence and consciousness[2].

Roger Caillois, for his part, sees a total antinomy between Persian poetry, which "enumerates and classifies the content of the universe"[3], and "most poets of the time [who] disdain beasts and things, beings and events", a periphrasis which seems to designate the surrealists.

Recent research has overturned this perspective and has allowed these assertions to be nuanced. Henri Béhar, in his article "Surrealist at a Distance," encourages us to "uncompartmentalize our brain," to no longer reason in terms of groups and to take more into consideration individuals, "with their preferences, their execrations, their secret garden too"[4]. And indeed, he demonstrates to us how close Saint-John Perse and André Breton are to each other, even though they could never meet. The poet's personal library teaches us that Saint-John Perse possessed an essential work, whose very numerous annotations reveal a genuine interest in most of the perspectives offered by the surrealists. Since the poet left only few theoretical writings, it seems interesting to us to use the annotations left on this work by Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme[5], to determine the centers of interest that captured Perse's attention and to confront them with his own conceptions of the unconscious, poetry, and life.

How is the unconscious perceived by Saint-John Perse? In a letter to Paul Claudel, dated August 1, 1949, he observes:

Art itself is in my view only incest between instinct and will[6],

an assertion immediately clarified in a note by the poet when he writes the critical apparatus of his Complete Works in "La Pléiade":

Archibald Mac Leish had already heard Saint-John Perse express himself thus on the relations of the subconscious to the conscious: "There is no true poetry, no living creation that does not fully derive from the subconscious. But the subconscious must be severely treated and controlled by reason. For the more a poet advances into the world of mystery, the more he follows these unknown routes of a Kansu, of a Sinkiang, which all tend, through analogies, through associations of ideas and through echoes, from word to word, toward a very ancient continent (but still unexplored), — and the more he needs, in this deviation, his memory and his will'[7].

This "unexplored continent" presents striking similarities with the description of the unconscious that Carrouges makes when he presents automatic writing:

it is the emergence, from the darkness, of the promontories of an unexplored continent[8].

Let us return to the letter to Paul Claudel, dated 1949, and try to clarify the following quote, placed in parentheses[9]:

The Poet, for centuries in France, was only a rider without a mount; one day he wanted to be only the beast without a rider. It would be time to reconcile the irrational and the rational[10].

The beast represents in a caricatural way the "animal' part of the human being, that is to say his instinct, his desires, his imagination, while the rider embodies reason, will, the conscious part of each individual. The confrontation of this quote with other statements by Saint-John Perse[11] leads us to deduce the very strong association between "irrational' and "unconscious'. The artist, especially in the Western world, abandons himself with difficulty to the flow of the unconscious and opposes to it "a grid' that cannot be crossed, according to Michel Carrouges's words:

in the Westerner, a thick grid of spontaneous criticism, often unconscious, comes to break from all sides the flow of words and images that rises from the depths of the subconscious[12].

The semantic field chosen by Carrouges to describe the mechanisms of the human mind: the "shadow side of consciousness'[13], the "interior eyelids'[14], the "midnight sun"[15]... exactly overlaps that of Saint-John Perse:

"Contribution also from the other shore! And reverence to the / Black sun from below! [...] magnificent eye / of our vigils! pupil open on the abyss'[16], "the abyss of his eyes'[17], "Under these half-closed eyelids of man, which / Dante calls 'the lips of the eye'"[18].

Similarly, in Vents, speech is a living source:

O freshness, o freshness found again among the sources / of language!...[19],

an image that we find in Carrouges, when he describes automatic writing:

A trickle of water that flows has meaning, from the mere fact that it flows. It is the same with this living source that springs from the layers of word-images suspended in the subconscious[20].

The images resonate with the same echoes. There exists a "verbal matter migrating toward consciousness'[21] which remains still a true enigma of human thought and only the "emerged summits of the sea of the unconscious'[22] point out. The word "discovery"[23] is a key word for both authors.

Since all phenomena of the mind find their roots in the unconscious, what about poetic creation? "The fact that the subconscious is the only supplier of poetic images'[24] seems to assert itself. Thus the "total unleashing of the unconscious'[25] is at the "origin of poetry"[26].

Much more than an "unexplored continent"[27], the unconscious is a true reserve of "words in freedom"[28] of which only a few "promontories'[29] are visible:

in the immense shadow of the subconscious, there are mental slopes on which words stream, marvelous torrents radiating all the fires of their images. Through this is revealed a vast orographic and hydrographic system that holds itself on the shadow side of consciousness and constantly feeds its light side[30].

But the unconscious concerns even vaster domains and thanks to it, one realizes that the human being himself is a universe without limits whose immense forces are unknown:

there is in man at the very depths of himself, a mysterious region that already surpasses the human condition and that communicates with the supreme point[31],

where high and low, the communicable and the incommunicable are no longer clearly discernible, according to André Breton's famous formula.

If poetry, in Perse, does not merge with the free expression of the unconscious, it nevertheless holds a mysterious power capable of exploring the "secret ways of the ineffable and the inconceivable"[32]. The poet, who finds himself "closest to the principle of being"[33], is the only one who can operate the "reintegration of lost unity"[34]. Indeed, in poetry, "true grandeur, secret power among men"[35],

Sound, matter and light unite to celebrate a same energy, which wants to be harmony[36].

Does this "harmony" correspond to the supreme point sought by mystics? In any case, Saint-John Perse seems to share the idea of a "collective unconscious' that would gather all men and unite them to the universe:

All unconsciouses, all dreams, all poems communicate in a same universe which is only the unexplored face of the universe where men of flesh and blood come and go.[37]

If automatic writing really inspired curiosity in Saint-John Perse, why did he not give free rein to his fancy and attempt the adventure? Indeed, according to Carrouges,

there is not on one side a purely reflective writing (except perhaps in mathematics, and even then...) and on the other side a purely unconscious writing, which would moreover be nonsense. There are indeed two types of antagonistic writing, but in both consciousness and subconsciousness have their role and remain inseparable[38].

It is not doubt that holds back Saint-John Perse but on the contrary the intimate persuasion that the powers of the human mind are of such force that they must absolutely be channeled. He moreover reproaches Valéry for not abandoning himself to nocturnal powers:

He wanted indeed to be lucid even in creation; now that is impossible. He did not want to give their part to the irrational and the unconscious[39].

Is the poet not speaking of himself? While recognizing that a face of man remains hidden from him, he relentlessly subjects his mind to conscious work, like a wild horse that must be restrained. For the peril is enormous: the poet risks losing himself in vain in this region where much less automatism than "chaos'[40] reigns. Indeed, reason must resist the

numerous currents of force that convey flows of images and words and that dispute the audience of consciousness[41].

Reason or madness, such is the stake of an experience as dangerous for the human mind: André Breton and Philippe Soupault brushed against unreason and death when they experimented with automatic writing at high speed. Other dramas forced the surrealist group not to go further toward the unexplored continents of consciousness at the risk of total self-destruction. But does not his intimate harmony with the movement of being always put the poet in danger? Michel Carrouges formulates this doubt thus:

It may also be that, in a general way, poetry is a power of disorientation, without one being able to always affirm that this power is the introducer of a higher orientation or of the fall into the most vain of confusions[42].

As for Perse, he is conscious that the poet must remain awake, he who "has sniffed, at man's height, the abyss of the real and the supernatural'[43].

c.prinderre@wanadoo.fr

    1 — "[...] the poet invests himself with a surreality that cannot be that of science." (O.C.; p. 444, Stockholm Speech of December 10, 1960.)
↩     2 — Parent, Monique, Saint-John Perse et quelques devanciers, Paris, Klincksieck, 1960, p. 242.
↩     3 — Caillois, Roger, Poétique de Saint-John Perse, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 199.
↩     4 — Béhar, Henri, "Surréaliste à distance" in Europe 799-800, 1997, pp. 59-64.
↩     5 — Paris, Gallimard, 1950, 356 p.
↩     6 — O.C.; p. 1017, Letters from Exile.
↩     7 — O.C.; p. 1300.
↩     8 — André Breton et les données, p. 134. All underlined passages were underlined by Saint-John Perse, on his personal copy.
↩     9 — We know the importance of parentheses for Saint-John Perse, who uses them to emphasize essential ideas.
↩     10 — O.C.; p. 1017, Letters from Exile.
↩     11 — Cf. further on, the passages from Saint-John Perse's interview with Gabrielle Clerc
↩     12 — This quote is marked by a vertical line in the margin, André Breton et les données, p. 127.
↩     13 — Ibidem, p. 130.
↩     14 — Ibidem, p. 130.
↩     15 — Ibidem, p. 130.
↩     16 — O.C.; p. 228, Winds.
↩     17 — O.C.; p. 248, Winds.
↩     18 — O.C.; p. 454, Florence Speech of April 20, 1965, on the occasion of the 7th centenary of Dante.
↩     19 — O.C.; p. 248, Winds.
↩     20 — This passage is marked by a vertical line in the left margin, André Breton et les données, p. 129.
↩     21 — André Breton et les données, p. 131.
↩     22 — André Breton et les données, p. 123.
↩     23 — Ibidem, p. 134.
↩     24 — Ibidem, p. 129.
↩     25 — Ibidem, p. 122.
↩     26 — Ibidem, p. 153.
↩     27 — Ibidem, p. 134.
↩     28 — Ibidem, p. 145.
↩     29 — Ibidem, p. 134.
↩     30 — Ibidem, p. 130.
↩     31 — Ibidem, p. 34.
↩     32 — O.C.; p. 451, Florence Speech.
↩     33 — O.C.; p. 455, Florence Speech.
↩     34 — O.C.; p. 453, Florence Speech.
↩     35 — O.C.; p. 459, Florence Speech.
↩     36 — O.C.; p. 451, Florence Speech.
↩     37 — André Breton et les données, p. 310.
↩     38 — Ibidem, p. 182.
↩     39 — Clerc, Gabrielle, "Interview with Saint-John Perse" in Saint-John Perse ou de la poésie comme acte sacré, A la Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 1990, p. 205.
↩     40 — André Breton et les données, p. 167.
↩     41 — Ibidem, p. 167, this passage is marked by a vertical line in the right margin.
↩     42 — Ibidem, p. 298.
↩     43 — O.C.; p. 457, Florence Speech. ↩